Hillary Clinton Expresses Confidence in Securing Nomination Next Week

Hillary Clinton continued to campaign on Friday in California with a rally in Culver City.Credit
Monica Almeida/The New York Times

CULVER CITY, Calif. — A day after offering a forceful denunciation of Donald J. Trump, Hillary Clinton on Friday expressed hope that she was only days away from putting the long-running Democratic nominating fight behind her.

“If all goes well, I will have the great honor as of Tuesday to be the Democratic nominee for president,” she said at a rally featuring a lengthy lineup of well-known actresses, including Sally Field, Debra Messing, Elizabeth Banks, Sophia Bush and Mary Steenburgen.

Mrs. Clinton is expected to secure enough delegates on Tuesday to become the party’s presumptive nominee, probably before the polls close in California, one of the six states with nominating contests that day.

The moment cannot come soon enough for Mrs. Clinton, who has already turned her attention to Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, attacking him on a variety of subjects at campaign events, while almost never mentioning her remaining Democratic rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

But Mr. Sanders has proved to be a formidable opponent in California, and the primary here Tuesday is expected to be close, even if its importance is symbolic, given Mrs. Clinton’s wide lead in delegates.

In her final campaign swing in California before the primary, Mrs. Clinton turned on Friday to some celebrities to give her a boost.

In a gym at West Los Angeles College, the D.J. Samantha Ronson handled the music, and a procession of actresses spoke in support of Mrs. Clinton and skewered Mr. Trump.

“He ran a university, it no longer exists,” Ms. Banks said. “He had a TV show, it no longer exists. He had hair. …” She let those words linger, and the crowd laughed.

Ms. Messing warned that if Mr. Trump became president, “We will be a country led by a reckless bigot and misogynist.” Ms. Bush said Mr. Trump wanted “to make our country a fearful reality show contest.”

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And Ms. Field questioned why Mrs. Clinton had been criticized as unlikable, asking, “What is this, a high school popularity contest?” She said that Mrs. Clinton was “not running to be everybody’s friend.”

“Women have spent the last hundred years trying to get out from under the expectation that they had to be sugar and spice and everything nice,” Ms. Field said. “We don’t need sugar and spice and everything nice.”

Mrs. Clinton did not use up all her available star power at Friday’s event. The actress Jamie Lee Curtis joined her at a rally in California last week, and the singer Jon Bon Jovi spoke at a rally on Wednesday in New Jersey, which also votes next week.

And in Los Angeles on Monday, she will hold a fund-raising concert featuring Christina Aguilera, Andra Day, John Legend, Ricky Martin and Stevie Wonder.

At the rally on Friday, Mrs. Clinton brought up her speech the day before, in which she declared that Mr. Trump was unfit to be commander in chief and said that electing him would be a “historic mistake.”

Mr. Trump later wrote on Twitter that Mrs. Clinton “made up things” in her speech. But Mrs. Clinton told the crowd on Friday that she simply repeated “what Donald Trump has said.”

“I didn’t make any of that up,” she said. “I mean, it would be hard to make up. And by the end of working on that speech, even I was saying, ‘Did he really say all of this?’ Well, indeed he did.”